“Social Audit To Fight Corruption In Public Procurement In Albania” SAT/AL Project Launch Event

CSR Communication Center launched the project "Social Audit to Fight Corruption - Public Procurement in Albania", on October 8^th 2019, in Hilton Garden Inn Hotel in Tirana. This project is funded by SELDI (South East European Good Governance Anti-Corruption Coalition for Leadership, Development and Integrity) and is supported by the European Commission.

The participants were representatives from all the stakeholders involved in the project, respectively from the contractual public institutions, monitoring institutions, media, investigative media, CSO’s, the community and business representatives.

During the opening, Mrs. Marinela Dervishi, the Executive Director of the CSR Communication Center had a welcome note and thanked the participants for their presence and future potential collaboration during the implementation of the project. Mr. Redion Qirjazi (Head of Security Program & Researcher), from IDM as a SELDI partner, explained the audience the theoretical aspects and challenges of implementing Social Audit Tool in Albania; while Ms. Amena Losha, Research Assistant at ACER - SELDI Partner, made a historic overview of SELDI's presence in Albania.

Dr. Holtjana Bello, Social Audit expert stated that “The citizens have the opportunity to audit their own money used for public spending”. This is a European Union funded project under the SELDI Project of the Western Balkans countries focusing on Anti- Corruption, and implemented in Albania by CSR Communication Center.

The main purpose of this project is to audit simultaneously the Procurement and the Contracting Authorities, by measuring perceptions attitude and facts given by the private business, citizens and the civil society with a view to tackling irregularities, legal weaknesses in transparency leading to corruption. Citizen’s pressure strengthens the internal controls of Contracting Authorities, detects and reports abuses, empowers the citizen by participating in the process of monitoring public funds.

The same passion and interest that every citizen uses to control the family budgets, has to and can be applied to also monitor the taxes allocated to public spending. Citizen can and have to participate in monitoring, because they can improve their quality of life by controlling the budgets invested in roads, schools, hospitals, energy, etc. At the end of this project we aim to have more empowered citizens, who can use the Social Audit Tool and are able to detect irregularities when there is a misuse of their taxes.

Transparency translates to lower corruption, Dr Holtjana Bello stated. Improving transparency with the citizens involvement reduces corruption, so the citizens participatory attitude is crucial to have less corruption and better quality of life fo the Albanian citizens.